The asteroid, named Florence, is an almost three-mile wide rock that will pass safely within about 4.4 million miles of Earth (7 million kilometers) at 8:05 a.m. ET on Friday, NASA says.

And while a few million miles sounds like a lot of room, it's actually a pretty close pass when you're talking about the vastness of space. Other asteroids have passed closer to Earth than Florence, but few have been this big.

But there's no need to get Bruce Willis and his crew involved. Chodas told CNN in an email interview that Florence is not an immediate threat. "Certainly not for the next several centuries, and not likely over the next many millennia either," he said. "It's possible this asteroid could threaten our planet in the far distant future, but it's unlikely."

continued at link...http://edition.cnn.com/2017/08/31/us/asteroid-florence-earth-fly-by-trnd/index.html

I wonder what a flat earth would look like if an asteroid hit it... Like a pie with a bite taken out?

i'm guessing that: since it's in orbit... the initial mass that would've hit would either be absorbed or discharged (very slowly)/deflected (IF WE'RE LUCKY) .... otherwise it'd be cataclysmic if anything struck and broke the mantle..... there'd simply be so much devastation and noxious gases that virtually all life would perish until the next change.

Maybe a new atmosphere would occur over time as the elements began to settle.

Anyways, this is what one of my favorite guitarists was on about about 2 months ago. They'd gotten "ASTEROID DAY" RECOGNIZED....to very little fanfare.

It seems that humanity isnt prepared to be "adult" about retention of life, and instead of having logical discussions and scenarists paint a picture about this stuff... it'll likely be left to a committee... or to billionaires to provide a solution (or departure...but more likely solution until a "sustainable alternative world" becomes available)

I think there are telescopes setup all over the country to view it as it passes by. There's something here, but I'm not familiar with the location and I'm not wandering around trying to find it. Rueben H. doesn't look like they have telescopes setup for this so I'll watch the news.

Asteroid Florence Has Two Moons

A large Earth-approaching asteroid, now sailing near Earth, has a lumpy shape and is accompanied by a pair of tiny moonlets.

A radar image shows asteroid 3122 Florence and tiny echoes from its two moons. Here is an animation that shows them more clearly.

NASA / Jet Propulsion Laboratory

Backyard stargazers are enjoying the chance to watch the big near-Earth asteroid 3122 Florence sailing past Earth. Yesterday it came no closer than 7.0 million km (4.4 million miles or 0.047 astronomical unit), but even so it got as bright as magnitude 8.7 and will remain 10th magnitude or brighter through the evening of September 5th.

The asteroid’s slow, leisurely encounter provided a great opportunity for planetary astronomers to probe the asteroid with the big radar-equipped dishes at NASA’s Goldstone tracking station in California and Arecibo Observatory in Puerto Rico.

The Goldstone runs, which began August 28th, have already paid big dividends. A team of scientists at NASA’s Center for Near Earth Object Studies (CNEOS) announced late on September 1st that Florence is orbited by a ...mall moons. “The sizes of the two moons are not yet well known, but they are probably between 100 - 300 meters (300-1000 feet) across,” the team notes. “The times required for each moon to revolve around Florence are also not yet known precisely but appear to be roughly 8 hours for the inner moon and 22 to 27 hours for the outer moon.”

CNEOS researchers Lance Benner, Shantanu Naidu, Marina Brozovic, and Paul Chodas (Jet Propulsion Laboratory) suspected they’d find one or more moons. Prior ground-based observations had shown that Florence spins quickly, once every 2.4 hours, and such a rapid rotation usually means there’s a companion. But triples remain rare among the 16,000+ near-Earth known asteroids — Florence is only the third to date, and all three were found through radar observations.

“When I posted the echo power spectrum and collage of images [on August 29th], I didn’t think there was any sign of a companion,” Benner told Sky & Telescope. "But when we processed the data at higher resolution late in the afternoon, the characteristic signature of a satellite appeared in the continuous-wave data, and then we saw the satellite in some 1-microsecond imaging data. We saw it again early [on August 30th]."

The Goldstone data also confirm that Florence itself is rather spherical and about 4.5 km (3 miles) across, as had been assumed from prior studies with ground-based telescopes and the NEOWISE spacecraft. The radar images reveal a ridge along its equator, at least one large crater, two large flat regions, and numerous other small-scale topographic features. If further analysis shows that the moons orbit near Florence’s equatorial plane, then that ridge might be a pile of accumulated debris that fell back onto surface after the impact event that caused the moons to form.